"Sword and Submission" Cover Art: Attempted Explanation

 Designing the cover art for "Sword and Submission" was much easier than creating the promo video for "Susan: Pet Shop Sex Slave 3." For one thing I didn't have to make a video. So of course I made a video ANYWAY and it turned out to be not nearly as much trouble and it wound up  improving things greatly. But I digress.

I started out with the idea of wanting a picture of Princess Zindra submitting to King Horth's warriors after a bloody battle in her father's throne room. First thing I needed was an image of Princess Zindra looking submissive. For that I went to my Second Life avatars which had all kinds of submissive poses. Turns out I had a  ready-made image. This one:

An image of a frightened naked ballgagged blonde woman in an urban night landscape. All it had going for it was that the woman was beautiful and  she had her hands up in surrender. But that was enough, it turns out.

I then ran the SL avatar through Leonardo AI's Image to Image program, which did me a huge solid.  I got this:

I did not ask Leonardo AI to get rid of the ballgag. Leonardo has a problem with gags. Generally it just renders them very badly. Substituting those beautiful lips for a gag worked fine for me. With AI you take what you can get.

 I now had a beautiful image, but it was unfortunately naked. Naked cover art does not pass muster on Smashwords. So I used my GIMP skills to draw on pasties and filmy tranlucent panties, very simple crude art, and got this:

OK, not perfect but not naked! Still I wanted more, so I ran my revised Leonardo art back through Leonardo again, including running it through the Upscaler program. And I got this: (Yeah, the third finger on the right hand was off, but whatchagonnado?) And why is the image flipped? I honestly don't know. It came in "handy" that it was flipped, but that was much later in the process.

I don't know why Leonardo AI decided that Upscaling art included drawing on a  filmy bra to match the panties, but it worked for me. It drew on nipple bumps as well (Smashwords does not approve of nipple bumps) but it was but the work of a moment to smooth those babies out in GIMP. So I had my sexy slave Zindra image for the cover! Even if the fingers on her right hand were suspicious.

Now that I had sexy mostly naked Zindra  down, I had to do the background. The proved much easier because no naked people, or people having sex was called for. As I've noted before, your average graphic AI will fight you tooth and nail before it will create a naked or nearly naked woman. (They also favor images of unhappy Asians in work uniforms, especially for crowd shots.)

But in this image I didn't get unhappy Asians in work uniforms and since there were no naked women requested, after a few false starts, I had my background scene. To wit:

OK, so it had a couple of flaws. The bodies on the floor are all kind of problematical if you look at them at all closely, so don't do that! 

The body in the foreground was the worst. But being a super genius cover designer, I had an ace in the hole in my sleeve. I realized the best way to place Zindra was to put her behind the looming figure in the foreground and in front of all those bodies. And I knew I could do that easily. I just copied the figure in the foreground and place it in a new layer. And I cropped it in tight and got this, my cover art:

I moved the warrior layer and the Zindra layer to a new location and closed in on the two of them. That got rid of all the bodies in the background and Zindra's butt covered the wonky parts of the body in the foreground and the warrior's body blocks Zindra's wonky hand. Because her image was flipped! Win win win!

The more obeservant among you may note that the image in the cover is not exactly the same as the image above. Very similar but the woman's posture isn't the same as the one in the image above.There's a reason for that, having to do with my further experimentation with motion videos. Which I will save for another post.